Sadly my strongest memories of MoM are crashing every 15 minutes.  (I know they fixed most of the bugs eventually but by then I'd moved on to something else, probably Civ 2.)

But I would love it if EWoM could implement something like Myrror...

Thread necroing ftl

I think this thread should be necro'd...  Let's go back to Feb and look at what ppl where saying... now apply the lessons learned before they continue repeating.

I think 1.08 is a step in the right direction, I can finally play a large map and at turn 215 and no crashes BRAVO SD!  but lets continue to improve AI and also the Tech Trees, my strongest grievence on 1.08 is still the weapons on the kingdom tech side...  MACE>WARHAMMER the simple fix would be to swap their positions in the tech tree.  I suppose there are also other better solutions, but I paid SD to think and implement them. If I wanted to make my own computer game, I would.

I disagree. A lot more pressing problems to solve in EWOM, myrror while nice is hardly the reason why EWOM sucks, adding it doesn't help much either.

I still have that gem of a manual somewhere in my house. The book that came with it was akin to the old school D&D books.  Full of detail and by no means a prefunctory effort, you are right that was huge part of why the game was memorable

What I loved about MOM the most is as others have described, the variants of options available and the fact that multiple combinations could be successful.  The management of overland magic and the tactical battles, arranged from top to bottom and not side to side with an actual variety of moves something else I remember.

Also really enjoyed the concept of switching between the worlds.  The music itself was memorable, I remember the one sequence with the harp still in my head as well 15+ years later.

Probably the best term that somes it up (although maybe not helpful to Frogboy) is "a cohesive experience", the whole game design held together remarkably well no matter which functional way you picked it up (aka: I pick these 3 books and decide to work on this goal to winetc).  It also went out of its way to make you feel like you were in a fantasy setting:  art/UI/music all fit together perfectly (the spell text becoming decipherable as you learned it was something I had forgotten). 

Last time I played was when i installed WIN95 and it broke the game (I was using the old DOS load high memory tricks), so my memory may not be as good as it could be.

I dunno, I think that should be extraordinarily helpful to Frogboy. I think the biggest singe problem with Elemental is a lack of cohesive design. All the good ideas and concepts in Elemental are poorly balanced and differentiated from each other.

Elemental just does not have that charm and feeling of being immersed in a world. Like the cut scene in MoM when you get a new spell, etc. It feels more like an APP than a game.

Well I don't think EWoM sucks... but yeah, there are plenty of things I'd like to see fixed before adding something like Myrror.  Just saying it was my favorite part of MoM.

Multiple Elemental Planes of existence not unlike Myrorr might be an interesting twist on an old concept for an expansion in 2011 but not this year, this game is not yet polished, some of the techs are out of order the AI needs more elbow grease, etc...

Please do not take any of my bashing on Elemental as I'm Trashing this game, I am not, I like Elemental, If I did not like it I'd not be on these forums as much as I am... I really truely want Elemental to be better then MoM and the AOW series.  It's not yet there but it does certainly have the potential.

Sadly, very true. And all the reasons for that were listed long time ago in February. So many great ideas nothing implemented to Elemental. I really miss the veriety that made you feel being challanged and the feel of being THE wizard:/ Instead we have heroes who are all the same, weapons all the same, spell books all the same and rases guess... ale the same. I know some people will argue that there are differences and they might be right. Its just the "feel" that every thing is the same. Sad.

After trying Elemental for a while, I'm back to Master of Magic while they do a bunch of patches which will hopefully turn this into an immersive game.  I personally think Elemental went too far down the Civilization Tech Tree path and included too much micromanagement to make it as enjoyable, at least initially.  I'm sure after patches there will be mods and hope that ultimately the game will produce something which can be called a worthy successor to Master of Magic.

Meanwhile, since none other than the esteemed Frogboy started this thread, let me continue as he originally requested:

*  rock, paper, scissors quality to the game wherein certain kinds of magic were very useful against and potentially "beat" other kinds when taken in pure form.  E.g., sorcery would typically not overcome death magic but would be very useful against, say, life magic, which could heal and had protections against death and chaos magic.  Nature magic could overcome chaos magic for the most part with low cost easy spells such as resist elements.

*  random events that can devastate a faction or alter the balance of power.  Ever have only one good sized capital city and watch it get hit with a meteor?

*  not balanced; you can choose to play a difficult race/wizard combination.  These differences made the experience more immersive.

*  Different races have strengths at different times.  Some say gnolls were "weak," but against non-sorcery players they could build stables early and have wolf riders, which would easily kill many other units. 

*  different choices have different strengths in the early, mid, and late game.  Getting to units such as paladins would necessarily take a while.

*  race relations.  What initial race you chose determined in part the amount of unrest in cities of another race which you took over.

*  complex, marvelous fame system which impacted everything from ongoing army cost to how often you were offered heroes or artifacts

*  limited magic available.  Choosing one book meant you would not be able to choose other books.  You could not choose both life and death.  One wizard could only have ? 11-12 spell books and only a certain number of retorts.  What you had determined which magic items you could make.  So you really had to plan ahead and even think about which really tough nodes to take on first.  Hmmm...if I get a chaos book from this node with the great drake, I won't be able to get the sorcery book(s) I need to make a haste item....

*  rich and immersive

*  made you feel you were the wizard, not represented by anything more than a tower (except in the spell learning sequence), and to an extent immortal when able to cast the spell of return.

I would cheerfully pay $200-$500 for someone to modernize the graphics of Master of Magic, make it a Windows game, fix the remaining bugs, and somewhat improve the AI.  You wouldn't even have to rebalance it much.  Atari?  Anyone?  And I suppose I have learned not to get too excited about titles that come from small developers at the time of their initial release.  While I won't pre-purchase a limited edition from such a company again, I do hold out hope that Stardock will continue to work to fulfill the expectations and hopes of its FRP-TBS customers.

I think you meen

Regenerating, Iron skined Great Worms

1. Diverser and unuque spell tree

2. diverse units with unique powers. FLIGHT, vampiric immunity to certain damage.

3. UNIQUE FACTIONS.

4. Item Crafting

5. Kick Ass Heroes and more Diverse Wizard Creator.

Why are people afraid to stick to what worked? And why not stick to gorgeous 2d instead of primitive 3d?

Given my general distaste for how Elemental has turned out, this is one of the few areas on which I disagree.

Granted I prefer some of the earlier mockups but I really do like the "paintbrush" feel of the world in general in Elemental.  It's a nice break from cartoony (Warcraft 3, League of Legends) and "realistic" (Dawn of War).

• Master of Magic was a single player game, made for a single player, and concerned itself with how the game played for the single player playing the game. The AI was never asked if it was less fun to get facestomped every time, to get doombolted to death while having units volcano sniped overland, or to have entire armies break against the unmovable Lionhearted, Invulnerable, Charm of Lifed, Warlorded paladins standing along in your city.
• Sixteen peasants with hammers would never do *jack* to your heroes.
• Your wizard was more than a Sov by being less than a Sov - you never saw your wizard, there was just this tower from which your power poured forth. You never actually stabbed or burned anyone with your wizard directly But by god when it came down to it your wizard was (depending on a spellbook or trait based approach) either the most hardcore general ever to lead troops, or the most planet-shakingly powerful sorcerer to ever hold a world in thrall.

"Everyone expects" 3D.

2D can be more time-consuming, too. Make a 3D model and you can shoot it from different sides. I play some old games, including Master Of Magic, DooM (with Doomsday or Vavoom source ports), Hexen practically daily. These games have low resolution, and are technically primitive in some ways, but they have very good artwork that doesn't age. I love many of MOM cutscenes, like researching a spell (with the black magic cat staring at it - great !), ghouls raising a few units (grotesque), War Bears.

Master Of Magic has a lot of charm. You  communicate with other wizards via magic mirrors. Powerbase distribution screen looks interesting - some magic rods or scepters filled with power. Instead of ordinary dialog boxes, you get those named Chancellor, Tax Collector, Apprentice, Surveyor etc. Get it ? They are your advisors. And to check your wizard's stats, you just ... look into Mirror.

You don't trump these images or ideas just by going 3D.

So lets get this straight this post was done in febuary, and everyone listed what they liked about MoM and nont one of those things made it into elemental

COLOR made Master of Magic stand out. Just go play a game of MOM vs Elemental and you'll see what I mean.

MUSIC the happy go lucky fanfaire music just kept one playing and playing and playing....

SIMPLE combat rules have mages throw fireballs, clerics heal and dispell undead, shoot arrows with archer units, charge with cavalry, melee types for defense and throw spells with heroes/leaders w/advantages for terrain and remaining on defense. (I can't remember the countless times I was able to hold my cities by just using the terrain and the defensive bonuses of them in the attacks).

SIMPLE economic rules. 1 worker equals 1 or more production points, 1 farmer equals 2 food/1 gold (bonus structures added to these values of course) it was so simple and worked so well so one didn't have to wrack their brain with mathematics to setup production or food sources.

Advanced Magical System: This is where MOM shined. So many spells so many ways to use them or combine them and so COLORFUL in their application on the screen. 2D was fantastic with this game....why the helll everyone is going to 3D is beyond me as 2D is so much easier on the eyes and takes up less cpu and gpu power. A very diverse spell type system from Life to Death to Fire and Sorcery to Earth and none of them really felt like a REPEAT of the others from other books of magic. Picking books of magic for power not just for name only. I'd take like 5 or 6 books of death, 2 or 3 books of Sorcery. I'd get to pick 4 spells I would definitely get from Death and 2 from Sorcery before the game started. This was a bit overpowering as a human player but it was still fun and exciting to be able to choose.

Unbalanced by races: Since MOM was a solo playing game the races didn't need to be balanced as this made for some very challenging games when you took lower classed races like gnolls or hobbits or orcs or barbarians.

What Elemental will need to advance above MOM is plenty of the above and one more great thing an AI that is devestating to play against. It must be the superman of fantasy ai's. Please don't worry about making it near unbeatable at higher difficulty levels, afterall that is what higher difficulty levels should be for is making the game HARDER to WIN not just making an AI harder to DELAY you from winning.

It will also need some SCORING system like MOM as I always liked to see if I could beat my HIGHEST score. Now, making a METAverse out of this and letting us compete with one another would be GREAT also in HIGH SCORES. Please make it where players can't cheat though and hack some high score they never made into the METAverse though.

Above all things though I think SIMPLICITY yet DETAIL & COLOR and fun things to do makes Master of Magic the greatest of all time fantasy strategy wargames. I still play it today more than any other game I own. I am thankful I lived in a time where such a great game was produced and I'm getting so many years of enjoyment out of it. I would say someone could play MOM 100 years from now or 1000 and still enjoy all that it offers in about 24mb of code. TWENTY FOUR MEGABYTES that says a lot for such little coding when you have games today in the 10's of GIGABYTES that suck so royally.

I liked:

• No need to spam cities. One could build just two or three cities, and still be able to win against the AIs dozens of cities.
• Lots of choices in how to win the game, and that I could change midway through and still do ok.
• How they races played different, but were still flexible enough to yield many paths to winning.
• The awesomeness of casting timestop!

I like Master of Magic and other Symtex game because they make cool acronyms

MoM

MoO

MoO 2 BaA

OK Fine, They had Charm as well.

It seems alot of game devs are making the same error, IMO, esp. when it comes to 4x games. Infogrames/Atari did it with MoO 3. They get so caught up in the tech, the how to make this work, and the coolness of certain aspects, that they forget its a Game. When you forget it's a game, they soul of it gets sucked out.

• I like MoM because it has SOUL!

No kidding. I just got the game recently, and have already seen this in both for and against me.

There's been times I'm like "ugh, no way my guys will win this" and somehow they do. They might be beat up pretty bad, but they won.

Sprites are hard work. There's so many 3D programs out there, but is there one for 2D Sprites?

I love them as much as anyone, and I agree, I'd rather have beautiful 2D over 3D. But I think 2D games are even more demanding in the art department, especially in animation.

Should prob explain what I meant, as a designer myself its frustrating when users give me feedback that isnt actionable, thats where I was going with that. Would imagine the term itself "cohesive design" is a hard concept to make actionable. 

It seems that the folks at Microprose (wasnt that Sid Meiers first shop?) had this mentality in 1993;  draw out a wish list of high level functions, then draw the inter-relationships and then war gamed the hell out of them with repolishing over and over until it was smooth.  The end result was a game that was simple to pick up, hard to master given all the options, with many many paths to take.  It also didnt get hung up on ancilliary tangents ("should this be rebalanced to make it all equal" etc) as it knew its product focus.  Would define that focus as "single player game/fantasy genre/turn based/focus on replayablity rather than AI" etc.  Perhaps I am being generous as the game had limited resources to build on (5" floppy disks as media, no room for ambiguity), maybe this tight focus was required in order to actually make the game distributable rather than by self choice .  Also in those days no forums other than USENET/LISTSERVS etc so prob easier to design in private.

For Elemental it seems that these building bricks just arent decided/firm enough to support a good user experience: AI/Global vs Individual mana pool/single vs multi player/money system and rewards (how much env/how much econ)/transport etc etc.  If these core models/features arent decided in a released product I think its fair to say the actual product definition isnt either at this point.  The key questions any product definition needs to answer is "what experience do we want a player to take away with them" and then "why will they keep using it?". 

For Elemental after playing it for about 1 month now, I still am not sure what the answer is to those questions.  To be frank I play it now more as a study of how its built/what can I do with it than any real challenge, it has enormous potential and its easy to see that some of the building blocks have alot of thought put into them. That being said I am rooting for it and hope it gets close to MOM someday in its own definition.

Many people wrote a lot of true things about MOM in this thread.

But I think there are two things I like most about MOM:

1) It is always full of good and bad surprises and twists of fate that shock you or make you cheer. As an example here a short excerpt from a fictious game playing as a life mage.

Positive/negative twists of are marked with +/-

+ I start alone on a decent land mass with two good independent cities I´m able to conquer

- My neighbour is Rjak and he is contacting me after bringing troops to my lands with ships. 20 turns later he declares war on me. I am able to keep my cities but it is a constrant struggle.

- Several turns later Jafa, an ally of Rjak arrives and declares war on me as well. Because of the constant fighting my mana is running low.

+ For some reason Rjak accepts my begging for peace. Some turns later Jafar does so as well. The war did hurt my expansion a lot but now I can hope.

- S´sra casts Great Wasting. My economy almost collapses.

+ I am able to contact Ariel and she is willing to trade "Stream of Life" in exchange for "Earth Lore" to me.

..... and so on

2.) You always have little goals on your way to victory: And each time you achieve such a goal it gives you a good feeling.

- capturing the first independent city on your starting continent.

- capturing the first independent city on another continent.

- capturing your first node

- breaking through to the other plane of the world

- capturing the first independent city on this other plane thus creating a foothold there

- building your first high end unit

- building your first high end unit with mithril / adamantium wepons

- banishing an enemy wizard for the first time

.... and so on